On April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Baltimore, like many other cities across the country, found itself engulfed in riots. At the time, the city was still over 50% white, though the demographics were rapidly changing. In just two years, blacks would nearly equal the number of whites, whereas in 1950, the latter outnumbered the former 2 to 1.

According to historian Betsy Nix, who worked on an anthology about the ’68 riots, this week’s clashes appeared to grow out of “social media—it wasn’t billed as a protest.” In ’68, the violence was more spontaneous and decentralized.

Baltimore is now over 60% black, and less than 30% white. According to F. Michael Higginbotham, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who focuses on race relations, the crucial similarity is that both Baltimore riots began with the death of an individual, though Martin Luther King, he notes, was a civil rights icon who was assassinated at the peak of the civil rights movement. What’s even more notable, Higginbotham says, is the ways things have changed.

“There’s a huge difference in the amount of devastation,” Higginbotham explains. “There’s a lot more diversity in leadership now”—a black mayor, for instance, and a black police commissioner—“and they want to implement reforms consistent with what the protestors are demanding.”

Dr. Peter B. Levy, a historian at York College who has extensively studied the ’68 riots, said the current unrest is specific to the strained relationship between the black community and police.

“You’ve had 40 years of the war on crime,” he says. “It was a conservative backlash to the civil rights movement, and it backfired.”